Help me! My windows crash!!

"Help Me! My Windows Crash!! It Don't Boot!"
Ok, that's not me screaming. But you probably encounter this several times in your time cuddling with windoze. I'm gonna show you how to prevent this as well as rescue your data when it happens. Note that I'm talking about XP. I have no experience with vista, and i don't wanna have tho.

XP's built-in system restore is ok. But it don't help you when windows refuses to boot up. There are several 3rd party programs to help you: most notably, acronis true image, first defense ISR, rollback RX and eaz-fix. Among the four, only acronis is still in active development; the rest are dying company (but their programs still work.)

All of them are commercial. However, acronis give away its version 8 and 10 for free and they works just fine. You can find the rest *somewhere*.

Acronis in fact never works for me. Moreover, i find its boot screen appear after grub. But there are a lot others find it useful.

FD-ISR also get a lot of praise. I just haven't try it out.

Rollback rx supposed to work perfectly. But there is one stubborn annoying problem with it. It eats my hard disk alive. Yes, within few days after installed, my hard disk shrinked until no more space left. I have to roll it back to baseline and uninstall. That's scary. But again, a lot of people praise it.

eaz fix is actually rollback rx rebranded. but some people claim it has some different codes and make it better than rollback. but i still havent tried it yet.

There, so far nothing stands out.

You could consider some program like returnil, deepfreeze but they are quite inconvenient.

So where is the cigar? No cigar, sorry but I'm now telling you a very effective way to rescue your data when nothing could save your windows. And that magic trick is called Linux.

Download any linux iso and burn it to CD. If you want it handy, use unetbootin to create a live usb. All computer produced after 2001 support booting from usb.

Now boot from usb, get into Linux and copy data to an external hard disk.

Some of you may scare of linux but believe me, this process is really easy. And if you only need basic stuffs from a computer, like school work,surf, music,movie... , linux is great. Tho if you wanna dig a bit, its learning curve is pretty steep.

For a linux distro, I suggest Puppy Linux, one of my favorites.

Beware!! The Infectious Disease Is Released!!!

The title definitely draws eyeballs. Yes, and that is not a new hit box office, but a linux release codename. Haha, some of you might be surprised that how those linux geeks can come up with such a good name! (well, good name, that's what I think.)

Ok, Infectious Disease is the codename of Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) latest release( 5th December last year). Woohoo, another ear-catching name.

I just discovered DVL exactly last night and quite surprised that I've never heard of it before despite I've been using linux for some years. There is no mention of DVL on DistroWatch as well as Wikipedia.

DVL is built on DSL, Damn Small Linux, a lightweight distro which revives your old 10 years old 486 stone age box. Different from its brother, DVL is supposed to distroy it!

"DVL is a distro made to be extremely vulnerable to security risks."

" DVL is everything a good Linux distribution isn't. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. DVL isn't built to run on your desktop -- it's a learning tool for security students."

"DVL was initiated by Thorsten Schneider of the International Institute for Training, Assessment and Certification (IITAC) and Secure Software Engineering (S2e) in cooperation with Kryshaam from the French Reverse Engineering Team. "The main idea behind DVL," says Schneider, "was to build up a training system that I could use for my university lectures."

"Schneider says that DVL's sole purpose is to give users as many security tools and training options as possible. "DVL is made by people with significant black hat backgrounds, incorporating the community of ReverseEngineering.net and Crackmes.de. It contains a huge amount of lessons, including lesson descriptions and solutions if the level has been solved by a community member at Crackmes.de."

That's about DVL. If you want to try Linux out, I suggest Ubuntu or Linux Mint. If you like this article, very easy, go here to donate :) Ooh, I love the Puppy.

Where is Singapore?

I just came across a blog entry with a pretty funny title, What Country Is Singapore In?
This blog is of AngryAngMo, a German expat living in Singapore for *just* 2 years.

To Singaporeans, this is a ridiculous question for sure. But for foreigners living in Singapore, this is not surprising at all. When I left my country, Vietnam, to Singapore, a lot of friends asked me that very same question, and more. Questions like "Is it very cold there?", "So can you speak Singapore language?", "Which city in Singapore will you stay?" are always at my expectation when I told someone that I was going to leave for Singapore.

I was at first a bit surprised tho coz Vietnam and Singapore are both in South East Asia and some basic knowledge about the region is taught in school. Then I was not sure I should blame this to Singapore being a such small country or the poor education in Vietnam which stuffs things in one ear and run out of the other.

That being said, I did get surprised in AngryAngMo's entry that Singapore is one of the only four sovereign city states, same San Marino, Monaco and the Vatican. This is the first time I heard about this. I just simply thought Singapore is a country and that's it!

I decided to make a search on "sovereign city states" and I came to a Wikipedia page where it says Singapore maintains "a significant armed force", "ranked highly in terms of defence spending and troop size". Even though I know every Singaporean guys have to go through army, I don't expect Singapore army has a significant troop size. That's pretty cool, hope the pirates in Malacca get busted.

If you are a foreigner going to live in Singapore, I highly recommend AngryAngMo blog. A lot of fun stuffs are there.